How Tony met Dr Jekyll (and flirted with Mr Hyde)
by tinglebop
Summary: Tony Stark is an arms dealer and he's totally okay with that. And he is not okay with that. Or: Bruce Banner doesn't know what the Other Guy did, but somehow Tony Stark is sitting in his lap and feeding him martini. He's not sure whether to be worried... or jealous. (AU - everyone is a criminal, no superpowers. Sadomasochism. Blood and violence.)
1. Chapter 1

A/N: So apparently I get really bloodthirsty when I'm sleepy…

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Tony Stark _loved_ working with criminals.

He loved it like a fifth son when all you want is a daughter. But there you are in the hospital and he's there and breathing and your four other kids are there and your wife's all, "_Never again_," and you're all, "_But honey buns_…" – because how is it your fault the girl ones don't swim as fast? And maybe you want to be the scary in-law for a change, and…

Tony needed to trim his analogies.

But as he stared down the barrel of a weapon that he_ recognised_ _personally_, insides still gleaming with polish and smelling like Stark Industries lube (for guns, calm down), he was pretty sure he had the upper hand on literature. Tony felt like he should send an email around, maybe write it across the sky, to let the goons of the world know that, after the first hundred goes, irony was no longer the highest form of wit. It was suicidally boring.

"You don't have the money," he concluded.

At his shoulder, Happy stood tense and still, holding a damp umbrella in one gloved fist like a baseball bat.

"It's a tough economy," replied – Mickey? Nicky? Ricky? – the idiot with the gun.

_His _gun, Tony reminded himself. Just because he swapped them for cash and favours did not mean they stopped being _his_. And… he decided immediately to revisit that last analogy, because _wow_ he'd make a terrible parent.

"In light of which," the idiot continued, "I was hoping we could talk about a new settlement."

Happy snorted. Tony sighed.

The gun looked liked a standard issue FBI Glock 22, steel guts, plastic skin, which Tony wouldn't ordinarily have been able to lay eyes on without breaking into hives. But in fact, it was a two hundred thousand dollar ballistic clone of a specific FBI Glock belonging to a specific FBI detective who had rumbled the Calabreses on a narcotics deal five weeks ago. Counting the 'domestic use', 'law enforcement' and 'likely to end up in evidence' premiums, and subtracting the customer loyalty discount, Tony felt he had been more than generous asking for a mere half million.

Reaching into his suit pocket, and ignoring the wave of alarm and drawn pistols, he pulled out his phone.

"For your daddy's sake," he began thinly, not looking up as his fingers danced across the screen one-handed. "How about… you either _pay me_ or fuck off?"

"How about ten grand," Mickey countered, "or I put a bullet through your head."

He smirked. One by one across the room, his buddies echoed the expression, leaning against the walls with their folded arms bulging inside suit sleeves. As if they'd all watched the same bad gangster movie and thought, 'You see him? The one in the background with no lines and visible daddy issues? I wanna be _that_ guy.'

_Ugh. _

Tony didn't even have the strength to roll his eyes.

Mickey Mouse was not going to shoot him. He was not going to lay a finger on Tony because if he did, the Calabreses would be fighting their drug wars with stakes and pitchforks while Jarvis posted missiles to the other side. Because the Starks had been arming New York since before Al Capone's grandmother left Sicily, and if they or their supply chain was threatened, then Pepper had the names and numbers of every player in the city who would happily ring bark the Calabrese family tree and then feed it through a wood chipper.

But Tony didn't say any of this aloud. As much as he loved the sound of his own voice, he was not in the habit of stating the obvious. There was a reason he turned down that MIT tenure.

Instead, he summoned a red, PRESS ME button on his phone and held his thumb down. Then, staring up from under lids heavy with disappointment, he enunciated in a clear, flat voice –

"Blow me."

The was a flash of surprise. But before Mickey and his friends could do anything more than sneer, Tony reached over to snag the umbrella from Happy and dragged him to the floor behind it.

As the canopy burst open on the confused faces around them, a single, soft sound seeped through the room.

_Beep… _

A block away, two teenagers hidden in a church basement were floating like clouds on a cloudy day when the explosion clapped like thunder in their ears.

They jerked.

Blinked at each other. Then stared at the door.

Finally, looked back at each other and then didn't stop laughing until the cleaner came in and beat them out with a mop.

Mickey Calabrese, third and least promising son of the late, great, Dino Calabrese, lay flat on his back, staring up at the ceiling with his mouth agape.

"_Uuuuurrrrghhhhh_…" he said.

His arms were splayed out, one up, one down like a cartoon Egyptian. Meanwhile, most of his right hand (the fingers and fleshy parts of the palm) lay scattered around him in a twelve foot radius of pink shrapnel from which Tony had been saved by his umbrella. The one outlying thumb had torn off at the knuckle and flown backwards past him, catching him with a red smudge on the cheek, before hitting the wall. His index finger had stayed heroically with the frame of Tony's gun, still curled behind the trigger guard and leaking thinly from the root along a dangling string of ligament. And finally, just right of centre, buried an inch deep between his ribs, was the short, slender barrel. It formed a spout from which a weak, foamy, cherry red fountain bubbled up to spill over his chest and onto the white carpet. Its coppery tang mingled with the smell of hot steel and burnt plastic to hang bitter and metallic in the air.

As the ringing stopped, Tony lowered the umbrella. Happy took one look at the scene, snapped his hanging jaw closed, saw Tony's less-than-surprised expression and glared at him in a long-suffering mix of disbelief and _so help me god, I will punch you to the ground. _

The goons stood wide-eyed and frozen.

Polka dotting the carpet in red, Tony threw the umbrella aside. Seven pairs of eyes snapped up at him. Guns were thrown down in a succession of dull clanks and hands reached for the sky. Without the benefit of an umbrella, they looked like five year-olds after spaghetti bolognaise. Terrified, terrified five year-olds and very red, very thin bolognaise.

"So," Tony rubbed his hands together, his salesman smile plastered back on his face. "Tell your boss I can have another one ready by next week, but… expenses, my umbrella, my time, your stupidity… call it seven hundred and fifty, all up. Cash on delivery. Oh, and Happy, could you…"

He gestured vaguely to the gun parts scattered around them – a firing pin here, a spring there, the slide at the their feet – and more specifically at the hardware sticking out of its mafioso pin cushion. Happy threw another dirty glare in his direction, to which Tony grinned blithely, and took a reluctant step towards Mickey.

"No, wait!"

The entire room got whiplash turning towards the voice. Happy (finally) got out his pistol.

Framed in the door, hunched over and panting, was a slight, frail-looking man with rumpled brown hair, streaked with grey, and nervous brown eyes behind wire frame glasses. In his sneakers, brown slacks and wrinkly shirt, which could have been purple some hundred washes ago, he might as well have walked in off the street for all the likelihood of him being part of the Calabrese crew.

"Wait," he repeated, raising his hands for Happy, but then looking straight past him to address Tony directly. There were shadows under his eyes and his skin was tired and wan, but his gaze held. "If you pull that out, he'll die. Let me help him first."

Tony stared for a moment, just absorbing the data, before picking one of the uncredited extras around the room to ask, "Is he with you?"

The man started, hands twitching up an inch, and then nodded hesitantly. No doubt he didn't want to be associated until he knew whether Tony was likely to have him shot.

"I'm a doctor. I took care of Dino," he explained. Tony didn't miss the casual use of old Calabrese's first name, nor the fact that this told him nothing about his identity. "Look… I know the score, Mister Stark. No hospitals. No cops. Just let me help him and I'll bring your property back to you. I promise."

Tony shrugged. Holding up his phone under the guise of checking his hair in the reflection, he snapped a picture or twelve of Doc.

"Why do I care if he dies?" he asked.

Something like amusement, or maybe just a trick of the light, flickered over the doctor's anaemic features.

"You don't. But his brothers will. A murder investigation means nothing to you, but if word gets out to the press…" he replied, "it might be awkward at the D.A.'s Anti-Corruption Fundraiser that you're hosting. It's this Saturday, isn't it?"

The room froze for a second time to watch with baited breath as the threat drifted delicately to land at Tony's feet.

Tony stared. He was… _fascinated. _

Utterly _amazed_ by this skinny, short-sighted, poorly dressed civilian just throwing cold threats at his arms dealer self in that calm, tired voice like he wasn't losing life span with every word.

The doctor adjusted his glasses, and then smiled thinly. With a hand on Happy's elbow, Tony coaxed the gun down.

"Okay, Doctor," he grinned. He couldn't have kept from grinning if he tried. "He's all yours."

The man nodded, then wasted no time striding past his gaping colleagues to crouch by Mickey's side. His hands were already wet with blood when Tony's business card landed beside him. The address of a private hospital was scribbled on the back.

"Send him there," Tony instructed. "They won't ask questions and we'll cover the costs."

The doctor looked up, surprised. "Thank you."

"Oh, this isn't for free," Tony explained as he slipped on his sunglasses. "Six p.m., tomorrow, my place. Bring a friend and I shoot. Forget my stuff and I shoot. Leave a single piece behind and… et cetera."

The doctor nodded once. With Happy in tow, Tony all but skipped out of the room.

And maybe there were _some_ perks to working with criminals, after all. You got to meet the most interesting people.

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	2. Chapter 2

Characteristically of cul-de-sacs with wide lawns and low fences, one of the neighbours had heard the explosion, seen the body being loaded into the back of an SUV and called the police. Now, leaning against his patrol car, the uniform was holding a cigarette to his lips while one of Mickey's soldiers cupped a lighter between his hands.

As he scrubbed the blood out from under his fingernails, Bruce could read the lie on his lips through the kitchen window –

_"…__backing into the drive and it just blew. Scared the shit outta me." _

He nodded at the sedan in the driveway, leaning on its flat tyre, helpfully stabbed a few minutes earlier.

_And Mick?_ Bruce estimated. The officer was facing the street, smoke gushing on the exhale.

"_Slipped_." A long drag on the cigarette, followed by an answering puff of smoke. Then a dry chuckle. "_Never put a knife pointy end up in a dishwasher, lemme tell you." _

Shaking shoulders accompanied the wheezing notes of smoker's laughter.

_Yeah_, supplied Bruce, _but you get a better clean…_

He pocketed his clunky watch to snap on a pair of blue latex gloves. Gaping chest wounds aside, he had no intention of catching Mickey's one night stand from some sharp bit of bloodstained shrapnel…

"Uh, Doc?"

He managed to get one foot out of the kitchen before a ziplock sandwich bag was thrust quivering into his face. His brain baulked for almost a full second before he realised what was wrong.

The sandwich was fingers.

"No, I meant…" _wrap them individually, you moron, _Bruce began, as he squinted woefully at the bag. Lasagne swimming in grenadine. But then he saw the face of the six foot, three hundred pound man behind it turning slowly green as he barely held the bile down his throat, and surrendered.

"That's… it's fine," he assured, and took it mercifully off the guy's sweaty hands.

They were out of ice, so Bruce had dug a shallow grave out of some Ben &amp; Jerry's. Once the bag was sitting safely under an inch of strawberry cheesecake, he sent the weak stomach out with his precious (and happily opaque) cargo to the waiting Bentley (Mickey had been carted away in the larger, and less expensively upholstered SUV). It was still lunch time on a rainy weekday and the police had come and gone; rubberneckers were at a minimum. Only next door's two pit bulls made any fuss. Twin puppies, grey and grey with snow white bellies and two inch fangs, snapped at the man's feet through the picket fence.

All he needed to do was trip, thought Bruce… catch a toe on the edge of the wobbly flagstone, and the container would go flying out of his hands… through the air and over the fence. The man would try and fail to catch it, then himself, but too late — crunch — he'd break the fall with his nose, red splatter on the concrete. The ice cream would land in the grass. The lid would spring open with the force of the fall, and then Mickey's fingers would spill out over the lawn as those white fangs tore through the plastic and crunched hungrily through the tiny bones, paws dyed crimson with congealing blood...

The door slammed shut. Then the dogs barked disappointedly after the trail of exhaust.

Shaking the image out of his head, Bruce escaped to the study and onto the peninsula of newspaper that extended over the messy carpet. Time to begin Stark's homework assignment…

* * *

They were almost home, edging into Midtown through mid-afternoon traffic, competing with business lunchers and early shoppers. The rain had moved off the coast and a faint rainbow was threatening to leap over the Empire State Building from behind a veil of clouds. Stark Tower was a tall, ostentatious column of dappled sunlight in the background.

Meanwhile, Tony was faced with a hitherto unforeseen problem: There were too many curly-haired, visually impaired, thirty-something men in New York City. And _not_ _one_ of them — he was giving himself repetitive strain injury in the thumb just swiping through the mug shots — was the one he was looking for. Facial recognition wasn't worth the code it was written in, he'd decided. That, or Doc had never had a driver's licence or used an ATM in the state of New York, let alone a police file.

"JARVIS, they don't look anything like him," he complained accusingly, glaring at his phone. "What am I paying you for?"

"_You're _not_ paying me, sir_," came the dry, slightly put-upon voice, miniaturised through the phone's tiny speakers. "_And I'm afraid the angle and eye wear are not ideal. I had to relax the search parameters to accommodate._"

"So clench up a little_._" He swiped the line up away and wracked his brain. No licence. No money. No record. But he was a _doctor_… "Alright, ditch police. Run schools. Universities. Yearbooks, that sort of thing. Anywhere that teaches Medicine. Start on the East Coast. Class of '98 and up… and call Pepper."

Hardly had the ringing stopped when he asked, "When's the last time you saw the DA?"

"Tony, I'm— Christ… Last Tuesday at Sotheby's. You outbid her for the Rothko." She was whispering rapidly, echoing faintly against a vacuous silence that suggested she'd been the only one speaking in a large room. Like… a boardroom.

"Thought so. The pink and yellow stripes or the one with all the…" he gestured searchingly, "orange?"

JARVIS' latest efforts had come through. He frowned in concentration and swiped through the list.

"The— Excuse me." From the muffled voices, she was making her pained excuses, followed by a quick exit on clip-clopping heels. Ambient noise swelled, then vanished again. A door clicked shut. "Rothko's untitled red. You paid seventy-two point eight. She quit around fifteen."

"Great. Put a bow on it. It's hers."

There was a silence in which he could hear pieces of Pepper's heart skittering across the marble floor of her office from all the way in California.

"Tony, what's…"

And then the rest was lost into the background as he suddenly straightened up. His hand tightened around the phone. His eyes lit up.

"Nothing," he replied absently and hung up before Pepper could finish the sentence.

It was an old photo, dug out of a cached version of a university staff list, small enough to be grainy when it filled the screen — but there it really was: Twelve years younger, with fewer lines, less grey and about ten pounds in better living, PhD candidate Robert Bruce Banner of Culver University smiled shyly at the camera from behind his wire frame glasses. The collar of a purple shirt showed just under the lapels of his white lab coat.

The grin spread itself over Tony's lips like butter on toast.

_Gotcha._

* * *

Three hours later, the kitchen scales clunked in at just under 835 g of deformed plastic and metal. Bruce drew a deep breath, removed his glasses…

And hit his head, _thunk_, against the cupboard door.

"_Hnnngh_…"

Twenty grams. He was just _twenty grams_ short of a fully loaded Glock 22 sans barrel, if the internet was to be believed — and of being concreted into the Stark Industries parking lot.

He and Mickey's sole remaining lackey (missed the spray but took a thumbnail to the corner of the mouth; was too busy throwing up to call 'not it' when the others left) had taken turns combing the carpet for shrapnel to save both their sanity. And also because the kid had flinched so hard on finding himself alone in a room with the doctor that he'd tripped over backwards on the slippery newspaper. Bruce would have laughed, if it hadn't been so tragic for everyone involved.

The problem was, he had no way of knowing for sure whether he was done. Even if every scrap was recovered, the weight must have been altered by the explosion, and then there was the the fact that Stark had turned it into a bomb. Which was, Bruce could appreciate even through his frustration, a work of art.

The detonator was, naturally, nowhere to be seen. For the explosive itself, plastique seemed the obvious choice; packed into the magazine along with the vanishing detonator, probably into the rounds themselves, and easily swapped out if Mickey paid up. Without C4's signature notes of motor oil, Bruce suspected plasticised PETN: child's play to source for a weapon's manufacturer, but also readily enough available on the black market to be anonymous. It had a higher blast velocity and relative effectiveness than RDX mixtures (like cousin Semtex or garden variety C4), so twenty grams might well have been enough to blow the gun without taking Mickey's arm. With the standard .40 S&amp;W cartridge, that would even leave four or five rounds free to be real, in case anyone actually tried to fire it.

It was almost a pity to see the effort wasted on Mickey's careless ass.

Tipping the tray onto the kitchen counter, Bruce had pulled up an 'exploded' (ha ha) view of the gun on his phone and resigned himself to sorting it out the old fashioned way when he heard the car pulling up outside… Car_s_. Two. One larger crunching down the driveway, one much smaller stopping in the street: a black van and a blue Bentley Spur.

"Oh, you've gotta be…"

Bruce quickly dropped his 3D jigsaw before he could accidentally throw the lot down the sink. Seconds later, the front door slammed open. A pair of Converse under designer jeans and a fitted John Varvatos tee squeaked across the floorboard and then Eddie Calabrese was swinging himself around the doorframe and into the kitchen.

"Doc!"

"Eddie, hi," he replied, not turning around. He plucked his gloves off with too much force and stung himself on the recoil. "I was just—"

"Cleaning up after Mickey's stupid ass. Yeah, I heard," Eddie replied. He hopped up onto the kitchen counter by the fridge. "Catch."

Bruce started around and just caught what was flung at him: it was the barrel of the gun, shiny clean and smelling of disinfectant. Eddie, he noticed, was hugging a tub of Ben &amp; Jerry's strawberry cheesecake.

"God, I wish I'd _seen_ it!" he exclaimed with a vicious, breathless joy.

Bruce could hear the door from the garage opening to admit loud voices. Washing his hands, he buckled on his watch and pocketed his phone.

"Did it really spurt out from the…?" Eddie gestured great fountains of fluid bursting out of his chest. His feet kicked the cupboards and he hit the counter with a fist like an overexcited child. "_God_, I wish I'd seen it."

"Two minutes. Then I'm gone," Bruce promised apropos of nothing. The voices were getting louder. Someone was definitely trying to start a fight. He'd left his bike keys downstairs…

"What? No, no!" Eddie slid down, leaving the ice cream behind to stop Bruce on his way through the living room with both hands on his shoulders. "Not on my account. Stay. Please. Actually…"

He turned them both around as the noise peaked. Three men had emerged from the garage, one of whom was being dragged kicking and screaming between the arms of the other two.

"… I could do with a bit of a favour," Eddie smiled sweetly. Bruce's heart skipped a gear.


End file.
